Posts tagged with 'beagle'

For Maverick Meerkat we’re continuing improving the ARM support for Ubuntu. With Lucid we got the first release optimized for ARMv7 (Thumb2 and SoftFP but not NEON), and for Maverick the plan is to keep the same ARM optimizations as base, but improving board support and user experience.

The main decisions to support these boards are basically the upstream support, solid community around them, easy hardware access and CPU power (standard Ubuntu is quite heavy, so we need a good and powerful machine).

At the moment we already got a good support for them, and the Beta release is somehow usable already! There are some development on-going to have a full working 3D interface (unity) for OpenGL ES much the same way we have for normal OpenGL devices. The only bad thing is that currently most of the 3D drivers for ARM (if not all) are closed source, so the development is a little bit harder than the usual.

If you just got your BeagleBoard xM, or want to try Ubuntu on your C4, please give it a try. For Maverick the idea is to give the users a pre-installed image, that you just need to ‘dd’ to your SD card, boot and adjust the environment.

In case you don’t have any of these boards, but want to use Ubuntu with different devices remember you can always try to build a ‘rootfs’ with RootStock. You’ll only need a working and compatible kernel and boot-loader.

And please, in case of you find any bug, want to help testing and getting Ubuntu better on your ARM device, just poke us at #ubuntu-arm (freenode). We’ll for sure be happy to assist you with any problems you may find.

Note for Beagle xM users: in case you find that your Maverick Beta image doesn’t boot with your board, please check bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/628243. This means that you have a Numonyx memory chip, and unfortunately the fix didn’t make Beta. To work around it just mount the first partition of your SD card (after giving ‘dd’) and replace your MLO with http://people.canonical.com/~rsalveti/maverick/boot/xM/MLO. After this just umount the partition, put it at your board and boot it.

It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and the main reason is that I just got a new job and I’ve being pretty busy with it :-)

After working at INdT for more than 2 years, I decided that it was time to move on, get back to Campinas, get closer with friends and family and start looking for a new job.

I had a quite good time at Recife, working with Mamona, Maemo and MeeGo, mostly helping bring up different ARM platforms to be used by the Institute in many different projects. The work was nice, but Recife can be hard to get through over the time. I’ll for sure miss the nice work place we’ve built, and the nice people I worked with.

About the new job, I’m quite happy to announce that I’m now working as a Software Engineer at Canonical. My main objective now is to help bringing Ubuntu into different ARM platforms, like beagleboard and the new pandaboard.

Canonical is awesome, and the people from the Ubuntu Platform Team is even greater. Had the opportunity to meet most of the people at the last Ubuntu Platform Sprint that was held at Prague, and it was awesome to see so many skilled and fun guys working together to improve Ubuntu.

That’s it, now it’s time to get back to work because we have a huge pile of cool and fun things to work on :-) If you’re interested in understading, helping and participating on what we’re currently doing, get at #ubuntu-arm, freenode, and ping me (rsalveti)!